A MAN OF PERFECTION JOE ROBBIE HAD A FIRE THAT WARMED MANY AND BURNED A FEW, SAYS DANNY THOMAS.

Joe Robbie, founder and president of the Miami Dolphins football team, became the success he always knew he would.

Robbie, 73, died late on Sunday at the University of Miami's National Children's Cardiac Hospital in Miami of what the Dolphins organization called a respiratory illness.

Over the years, Robbie was described by some as aloof, domineering, feisty, gruff, hyper-sensitive to criticism, vengeful, irrational, brusque, and a tight-fisted lone wolf.

All agree he was a perfectionist with little time for critics or disloyal employees. He was cursed for blacking out football games, praised for his charity work, slammed for building a new stadium near a black middle-class neighborhood and hailed as a hero when his team won two Super Bowls.

"He had a fire that warmed many and burned a few," said comedian Danny Thomas of his former Dolphins partner and longtime friend.

"He was a go-getter from the start," recalled boyhood friend Howard Wolf. "He was always a competitor -- not in athletics as much as in tests of intelligence. He was marked as different from the other kids in that way. He had tenacity. It is a difference that I guess has carried through his whole life."

That tenacity came from Robbie's parents. His mother was first-generation Irish and a celebrated baker whose angel food cakes still make mouths water in tiny Sisseton, S.D., where Robbie, the second of five children, was reared. His father was a Lebanese immigrant who operated a restaurant, pool hall and boarding house before becoming the town's police chief.

Robbie later called his Irish-Lebanese heritage "double jeopardy," explaining: "The only thing that keeps me in balance is knowing that I have an ancestry among two of the most volatile people on the face of this earth."

Short and slightly built as a boy, Robbie roamed Sisseton in patched clothes, developing the silver tongue that would win him state and national debating contests and provide the road out of the tiny farming community near the Minnesota state line.

"He was tenacious when it came to debating or arguing," Wolf said. "He could hold more than his own. It didn't matter what side he was on."

In 1934, Robbie dropped out of high school to help his family. He cut trees in the Black Hills with Roosevelt's Civilian Conservation Corps for $30, sending $25 of it home each month. A year later, he returned to high school and in 1935 was one of the two from his class of '46 to go on to college.

Armed with a debating scholarship, he hitchhiked the 85 miles from his home to Northern State Teachers College in Aberdeen, S.D., with plans of becoming a journalist. Politics and the law soon lured him in another direction, and, after serving as Northern State's student body president, he transferred to the University of South Dakota.

Robbie was a senior when he met the woman he would marry in the university library. Elizabeth was a freshmen and working her way through school for a history degree when Robbie tried to check out a book. She discovered that he owed $4.35 in fines and had been barred from borrowing any other books until the fee was paid -- a charge that an impoverished boy in Depression-era South Dakota could not meet.

They talked, and he walked her home. Two years later, they married. Over the next 20 years, the couple had 11 children. Nine survive.

The day after the Japanese sneak attack on Pearl Harbor, Robbie joined the Navy. Assigned duty aboard landing craft in the Pacific, he participated in five invasions, rose through the ranks to officer and earned a Bronze Star before his discharge.

At war's end, Robbie entered the University of South Dakota's law school under the G.I. Bill, was elected student body president and graduated in 1946. He opened a law office in Mitchell, S.D., and began dabbling in politics and forming ties with other rising stars in the region.

In 1948, at the age of 33, he entered politics as a liberal Democrat. He was elected to South Dakota's house. He was minority leader and the state's Democratic chairman before launching an unsuccessful bid for governor in 1950.

A year later, Hubert H. Humphrey encouraged Robbie to move his family to Minneapolis. The invitation was quickly accepted and brought the two men closer together. Robbie later provided Humphrey with financial support and worked tirelessly in his campaigns.

After setting up his own law firm, Robbie worked as regional director of the Office of Price Stabilization for four states in 1952-53.

His infatuation with football rekindled in Minneapolis with a $5 seat at Vikings games, and when a client began looking around in the mid-60s for a city for an American Football League expansion team, Robbie took the ball and literally ran with it.

At meeting in Washington in March 1965, University of South Dakota classmate and Navy buddy Joe Foss, then the commissioner of the AFL, urged Robbie to look at Miami, not Philadelphia, as the site for an expansion team.

With Humphrey's endorsement in hand, Robbie flew to Miami and received the blessing of the late mayor, Robert King High. There were financial hurdles, political roadblocks, numerous bruised egos before Robbie, with the financial support of comedian Danny Thomas and other members of a limited partnership, raised the $7.5 million Dolphins franchise fee and the team took the field.

There followed a series of other partnerships before the Robbie family took control, finally solidifying the team's future earlier this year by creating a living trust that will give the Robbie family control of the franchise for at least the next generation.

The same year that Robbie mortgaged his Minneapolis home, moved to Miami, took the title of general managing partner and began pushing his coaches and players into the Super Bowl also put him on the road to riches.

The football franchise he initially invested $100,000 in is now valued at more than $125 million, according to one expert. The Joe Robbie Stadium he built and opened in 1987 is worth another $115 million. While most of his personal wealth was on paper, Robbie owned a home in Miami Shores, several condominium apartments in the Miami area and a 4,00-acre ranch fronting a river in Montana.

There was tragedy mixed with his success.

A daughter, Kathleen, 22, drowned in Acapulco, Mexico, in September 1971, and four years later, a son, Dr. David Lyle Robbie, 31, plunged to his death from San Francisco's Golden Gate Bridge. He separated from his wife once and twice was arrested on drunken driving charges. He beat both counts but family and friends insisted that he always be driven by a chauffeur.

"I think there is some misunderstanding of who I am and what I am," Robbie once said. "I recognized what the public perception of me is.

"But I don't think I'm a harsh man. When you are driving to get a job done, everybody doesn't stand around patting each other on the back. You have to drive forward. You don't accomplish things without stirring feathers or causing friction. I ruffle feathers because I'm competitive. But that is something that's been rooted in me all my life. It's part of my heritage."

Funeral services are private. In lieu of flowers, the family asks that donations be sent to the University of Miami Center for Blood Diseases or the American Lung Association.

-- May 16, 1969: Robbie becomes majority owner of the Dolphins when he is joined by five Miami businessmen in purchasing Keland's interest.

-- 1970: Robbie hires Baltimore Colts coach Don Shula, 40, as Dolphins head coach and vice president. National Football League merges with American Football League. Dolphins post 10-4 season and go to playoffs. Pete Rozelle gives the Dolphins' 1971 first-round pick to Baltimore as compensation for the loss of Shula.

-- Jan. 22, 1989: The San Francisco 49ers defeat the Cincinnati Bengals 20-16 in the final minutes of Super Bowl XXIII at Joe Robbie Stadium, the first time since 1979 that the NFL Championship has been decided in Miami.

-- Nov. 14, 1989: Robbie announces establishment of a living trust that ensures family ownership of the Dolphins for at least the next generation.